An IM Client That Works
I’m not a huge IM user, but as good as Trillian is for managing competition on multiple fronts, there’s still a gap to be filled in the IM world. Yet for all the IM competition, could Meebo or Wablet, or one of the other IM competitors please add the one feature I need? What do I want? Simple. I want profile-based presence for my instant messaging clients.
What I am talking about? I want the ability to set my presence information independantly for different sets of users. When I’m at work, my IM client should only show me as available to my work colleagues and select close friends (such as my wife), so I’m not randomly interrupted when I’m at work. Similarly, when I’m at home, my IM client should only show me as available to my personal friends, so I’m not interrupted by co-workers who assume that I’m always available. I shouldn’t have to have separate IM accounts for work and home.
Maybe the IM services aren’t flexible enough to enable this. But as a user, I just don’t care about those details.
I think Yahoo! has a stealth setting for this, i use koolim.com at work and its pretty good for what i want it to do, of course it does not include the feature you want above which i would also LOVE to have. I love your blog, keep up the great work.
excellent idea, i wish someone would add it.
I hate koolim.com…stick with meebo or wablet.
IM will inevitably evolve beyond messaging. What comes to mind are two major trends: convergence and presence management. Convergence is principally about driving together the myriad networks beyond the kludge that presently exists when the problem is pushed the network edge, i.e. when the problem is addressed in the client. Most importantly, I would extend this to include SMS, which is indisputably the largest such network in the world — and already naturally converged with the world’s most ubiquitous and implicitly portable electronic device (which, incidentally, has now solidly crossed the one billion user mark). So far as presence is concerned, I am increasingly convinced the GPS phenomenon is likely to border on the revolutionary; one need look no further than the recent developments on the Sprint network for evidence.
Of course, everything you’re stating here in respect of selective identity revelation makes total sense, but perhaps cannot be properly realized until we have a standards based IM platform (derivative in protocol of XMPP, perhaps).
Yes, it would have to be renamed, but IM will change and — I believe — remain the most fundamentally useful form of electronic communication we may ever know.